Developing a visual language affects more than the aesthetics of a project. It influences usability, comprehension, and emotional responses. It’s a powerful tool for communicating with users, building trust, and creating interest.

There is no user experience without the user. Make customers the first place you start in designing your app or service. User studies work to uncover customer perceptions, wants and needs. When done well, they set a course for design strategy that drives innovation and creates a competitive advantage.

Clients ask: “...tell us about your process or design principles.” I am going to do something far more valuable: I am going to write about what has worked and what has not worked. In the weeks ahead, I will post a series of bite-sized articles that encapsulate the life-cycle of product design and user experience (UX), across a variety of industries, with clients both large and small, with consumer and commercial projects.

Trust me: you will have fun reading these and you will learn something new.

Creating a great user experience takes a combination of leadership, customer insight, workflow analysis, visual design, and precise front-end coding, followed-up with careful user observation. It takes an experienced team that tips the scales in favor of skill-sets over dedicated employment.

Should a client be willing to use a remote, specialized design team, there are guidelines to making this work. Guidelines that work for the client and the design team, whether you are working both on-site and remote, or exclusively remote.

If I look back at the customer research and user studies I’ve performed over the last 15 years, every one shares a common trait: we learned something significant that neither I nor my client understood about the customer.

Tools like mixpanel or SurveyMonkey provide insight into what end-users are doing within your app or service. These tools may even help gauge overall customer satisfaction, but that’s the not the critical part of the story. A well-executed user study will drive impactful user experience design (UXD), leading to beautiful things that engage your customers and create competitive advantage.